The impact of political ideology has been demonstrated by our edited volume Forensic Cultures in Modern Europe (2023) but within the FORCE project particularly by PhD researcher Sara Serrano Martínez in her thesis (2023) and chapter (2023): she showed how the Franco regime’s gender ideology had a strong impact on the prosecution of women accused of infanticide. She also underlined that the Spanish procedural law, which prescribed that each court had a permanent forensic physician attached, was an important factor in the role medical expertise played in the Spanish courtroom. Moreover, in their article comparing forensic expertise in Dutch and Spanish cases in the Netherlands, the PI and Serrano Martínez (2024) concluded that cultural ideas on gender and pathology were so strong in cases of infanticide, as to ‘overrule’ the major differences in legal systems, formulation of the law, and political ideology.
PhD researcher Pauline Dirven has shown in her thesis (2024) and chapter (2023) how important the role of British ideals of bourgeois masculinity were (e.g. the idea of the containment of emotion) in the practice of forensic doctors. In their bodily performances, scientific practices and in dress, the latter displayed the epistemic virtue of impartiality, which not only dovetailed with masculine ideals but also with their role in the English adversarial system (they wanted to demonstrate that they were neutral, not hired by either defence or prosecution). Dirven has thus demonstrated how gender ideals were entangled with the epistemic virtues of forensic experts, but also with the form of the national legal system.
Both Dirven (2023, 2024) and Lara Bergers (2023) have analyzed how rape cases were investigated and prosecuted in practice, for England and the Netherlands respectively. Their research testifies to the importance of studying practices in which forensic knowledge is made since this perspective often reveals different conclusions that previous research concentrated on ideals or discourses. For instance, Dirven shows how rape myths could be enacted in practice by British forensic doctors (Dirven 2024) and Bergers (2023) reveals how some rape myths can be contradicted in practice by Dutch police investigation, since the Dutch forensic culture was one of ‘witness testimony’, which overruled the distrust of female victims.
The importance of studying practices in a comparative perspective was also underlined in the chapter by the PI and postdoc Parfenchyk in their chapter (2023) comparing ‘crimes of passion’ in Russia and the Netherlands. Here, they argued that psychiatrists, judges and jurists ‘made’ this crime while ‘doing law’, and that gender images and political ideology were vital to the making of the crime in both countries, albeit differently: whereas in Russia the crime of passion was seen as foreign to a socialist state (that purportedly had abolished all individual property, thus also the woman as male property), in the Netherlands the crime of passion was seen as foreign because passion was regarded as typically French or Italian and the absence of a jury was thought to contribute to less leniency for the perpetrator. Forensic psychiatrists, moreover, played a more important role in the Netherlands than in Russia, because of the TBR system in the Netherland, and procedural law that attached more importance to forensic psychiatry than in Russia.
In short, the project’s focus on forensic practices and the notion of forensic culture has proven to be very fruitful. Where previous research neglected a comparative perspective, our comparative perspective has shown 1) the strong impact of gender norms on forensic practices in all countries; 2) the importance of political ideology on forensic practices 3) the importance of national legal systems and particularly procedural law, surpassing a broad general difference between inquisitorial or accusatorial systems 4) the lesser importance of technology in the forensic performances of experts.
